Off the Rails: How Anti-Black Racism Rerouted Metropolitan America’s Transit Paths

This project argues that mid-20th-century racial politics—particularly efforts by subnational officials to limit Black mobility during the Second Great Migration—shaped metropolitan transit governance and produced long-lasting disparities in transit quality and integration. Using novel historical and contemporary data, the study traces how racial change influenced the creation of fragmented transit institutions, higher racial concentration in transit ridership, and persistent differences in public evaluation of transit systems. A shift-share instrument leveraging migration exposure identifies causal effects of the Second Great Migration on institutional fragmentation and transit outcomes. Results show how racially motivated policy choices translated into durable spatial inequalities in access to collective goods and opportunity across metropolitan areas.